Actes du colloque SARI 2017 - Réinventer la mer

International audienceThe first paper in this volume tells the story of globalization through three historic events and oceans (Chinese trade around the Indian Ocean, the triangular trade via the Atlantic, and the new dynamics of the Pacific). The second paper has a regional focus and looks at how the sea-symbolism has haunted the Hindu mythological imagination as well as the Buddhist imagination in India. The third paper narrows down the focus to the state of Odisha in current day India and argues that its imperial and maritime past plays a role in nationalist/subnationalist identity politics. The fourth paper shifts the focus to another state in India, Kerala, by taking up for discussion Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's seminal award-winning novel Chemmeen (1955, The Prawn) and examines how it articulates the dilemma of a nebulous 'nation' as embodied within the fishermen community in the coastal state of Kerala in southern India. In this novel, the ever-changing and endless sea becomes symptomatic of a community in transition. Moving away from Indian perspectives, the fifth paper offers a universal one by reading the sea as a burial place in Littoral (Tideline), a play by the celebrated Lebanese-Québécois playwright Wajdi Mouawad. In the play, the sea is interpreted as the purifier that takes away the suffering and the havoc of human vicissitudes. The disciplinary thrust of the final paper is altogether different. It falls within the ambit of environmental studies and demonstrates how sea level rise and decay of mangrove plants due to toxic pollutants, natural disaster and other anthropogenic factors has caused severe coastal erosion in the islands of Sundarbans (the world's biggest mangrove forest) in Bengal. It predicts the unfortunate loss of the Sunderbans in its entirety by the end of this century